FLASH FICTION

This Bed Isn’t Mine

This bed isn’t mine.

With a yawn, I rub my eyes in an attempt to clear the sleep away. Nope, it’s not my bed or even my room. Where am I? Looking around, my half-conscious mind shutters like a camera, taking in my surroundings.

Frame 1: Macro. The linens are a dead giveaway. Crisp, white, and probably a super high thread count that would put my own shabby chic sheets to shame. Everything I touch is marshmallows and feathers.

Frame 2: Wide angle. I’m a tiny black beetle floating on a brick of soap in a sea of rich, glossy hardwood floors. There’s nothing within reach. No bedside table, no lamp, no comforting cup of lukewarm water. Just a desolate, squishy lifeboat.

Frame 3: Panning. A room with no corners. Light ricochets against a vaulted domed ceiling that rivals the Hagia Sophia. The infinite curved walls alternate. Bookshelf, window, bookshelf, window, bookshelf. Everything is white, even the books themselves. The thatched windows are open. The sheen curtains billowing, revealing…

Wait. What?

I crumple into the fetal position, eyes pinched shut. It’s not possible. I claw through my mane of curls, scratching, breathing, scratching, breathing and shaking loose the last frame from my skull.

It could be NASA photos taped up behind the windows, but the stars are pulsing, the cotton candy wafts of space dust drifting by. The universe is outside my window. Or whoever’s window this room belongs to.

This is not my bed.

“No, it’s not.”

I bolt upright at the sound of their voice. Too many impossible things were happening. Whipping around, I see them. A familiar shock to my heart and system confirms that I wasn’t dead. A jolt of that magnitude would have definitely brought me back from the furthest reaches of hell.

“Hello, love. Surprised to see me?” That curl of a half-smile. The hint of a dimple. The lilt of a British accent. It had been years since I had thought about them and years and years more since we had seen each other, but they hadn’t aged a single day. They were a preppy rebel. They were a beautiful contradiction. They were my beautiful contradiction.

I fell in love with them on a Thursday (of all days). If my friends hadn’t convinced me to ditch class to hop the English Channel for a day of sight-seeing, I would never have met them. I would never have been hypnotized by their whit or their blatant sexuality over pints and chips. I would never have waved my friends off. I would never have spent the afternoon letting them unlock chamber after chamber within my soul. I would never have allowed days to turn into weeks. I would never have dropped out of school to move into their London flat. For two years, they helped me unravel the tight spool of who I thought I was and wove me into something entirely new, with each thread carefully knotted around their nimble fingers.

“Well, don’t just stare. Aren’t you glad to see me?” They cross their arms. A slight electric energy makes their freckles dance. They’re like a photo so slightly out of focus that it appears to move. My head hurts.

“Of…of course,” I stutter, rubbing my eyes. “I’m just a little…what’s going on…” I interrupt myself, quickly looking around for a door, “and how did you even get in here?”

They smirk, “Oh, don’t worry about it. That is the least important thing.”

I scoff at them, unable to restrain my usual sarcasm, “OK, well, if that’s not important, I’m not sure what is.”

They shake their head. In just two steps, they’re to the bed and slipping off their boots. Damn decent of them, I think to myself before remembering that this isn’t my bed.

“This is what is important.” When they take my hands in theirs, I barely notice their strange weightlessness. My mind is fighting against the memories of another time we were in bed together. Somewhere below my heart, something else stirs.

Another time, another bed. We were inseparable. Invincible. Intertwined together, lost together, tied together in a hopeless heap of lust and perfect clarity. Our bed was ours. We shared it like our home, our hearts. They were my first, and I was their last.

“I need to ask you something.” Blink. Their eyes flicker for a second. Is it hope or desperation? Blink. I can’t read it. Blink. And it’s gone.

“Sure. What?” My curt response is tipped with poison, my only defense against that vulnerable flicker in their eyes that could send me tumbling back to our past.

They take a breath and hold it while I shore up my reserves, gathering more barbed words on the tip of my tongue. Slipping back into our old ways feels like home, like a warm bathtub with a live hairdryer balancing on the edge, seconds away from tipping into the water.

Whatever spark drew us together sputtered and died quickly the second year in the flat. I shrunk as I struggled to understand myself and how I was changing. I was a dried flower dropping petrified petals left and right. They were throwing sparks, their patience a thing of the past. The novelty of my innocence wore off. The confidence that drew me to them twisted into dominance. They knew who they wanted me to be, but I was too slow to adapt.

Suddenly releasing my hands, they suddenly wrap me in their arms. The tenderness should have shattered my defenses, but unlike when they held my hands, this time, I feel something strange. The toned muscles I remember and see in front of me feel like gobs of wet sand that slither between my fingers. Their waist has odd lumps and bulges that my hands don’t remember. It feels like I am hugging a melting elephant seal.

“Will you come with us to Jamaica for…for our wedding?” Each word a bullet.

Their words ricochet me back to when it all fell apart, coincidentally on a Thursday (of all days). Sitting in our bed, they held my hands, holding their breath, and trying to find their courage to tell me. In a single exhale, they told me all about another “them.” How they met, how long they had been secretly meeting, how they were hopelessly in love. Hope, or maybe it was desperation, flickered in their eyes when they asked me if I was OK, and they crushed me in an embrace when I numbly responded that I was moving out.

My face is still in their neck but in a different dimension. I breathe in. I can almost smell them, but I don’t. I know now. My mind is playing tricks on me. None of this is real, and yet it’s so real.

I finally understand. On that Thursday afternoon, they explained how they had changed, how they were in love. They told me how they had been shocked by the jolt of newness, how they couldn’t find the words, how they lost patience with trying to keep up the charade of who they had been. If I hadn’t been choking on pieces of my heart, I might have understood then. They were telling me my own story.

Pulling back from the hug, I hold their hands now and say, “Sure. I’ll go with you.”

Inky droplets peppered with stars tumble down their cheeks. The light starts to seep straight through them. The body that I knew as well as my own was fading. They are nothing but cigarette paper.

My hand only touches air when I reach out now.

This bed isn’t mine. It never was.